Alarming fact alert: the going rate for a babysitter in New York is $14 to $16 an hour, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal about how much you should pay your sitter. (Not nanny! Sitter.) Am I the only one who made $2 to $4 an hour at best doing this shit? A brief poll suggested not: Anna and Jennie both made $5, Dodai made between $4 and $7 looking after four boys, Tracie made whatever they gave her at the end of the night, and most of us (Dodai exempt) got out of the racket as soon as we were eligible for predictable hours at the highly-coveted minimum wage. Which was, at the time, $4.85 an hour. It has risen a whole dollar since then. So why did baby-sitting get so crazily lucrative? Seriously, I made $10 an hour as a phone sex operator, and $17 an hour as a private SAT tutor, but $16 an hour to watch TV and eat exotic junk food defies logic, especially when the teen unemployment rate has hit record levels.

A theory: you cannot trust anyone in the generation that grew up idolizing Britney Spears to take care of your kids. Duh.